environment Politics: assholes denialists heroes Republican obstructionism Storms
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Year 4, Month 6, Day 4: Oh Yeah, Oh Yeah.
The New York Daily News, on Sheldon Whitehouse and Oklahoma:
A Democratic Senator who came under fire for linking turbulent weather in Oklahoma to Republican politicians who don’t believe in climate change has apologized for the ill-timed remarks.
Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse on Wednesday said he wasn’t aware that deadly tornadoes were hitting Oklahoma at the same time he made his statement, in which he criticized Republicans who take issue with climate change but still seek out federal relief funds after natural disasters.
“Tragically and unbeknownst to the senator at the time, a series of tornadoes were hitting Oklahoma at the same moment he gave his remarks,” a Whitehouse spokesman told FoxNews.com
“Senator Whitehouse regrets the timing of his speech and offers his thoughts and prayers to the victims of yesterday’s storms and their families, and he stands ready to work with the senators from Oklahoma to assist them and their constituents in this time of need,” the spokesman added.
As you value your sanity, avoid the comment thread on this article. May 23:
Sheldon Whitehouse’s weekly speeches frequently note the impact of extreme weather events on different states in the US. While his apology for the timing of a recent address is gracious and welcome, he’s got nothing to be ashamed of. Oklahoma’s own Senators, by contrast, are a different story. Tom Coburn’s “fiscal conservatism” is a kind of derangement in which spurious principles are misapplied to the detriment of his own constituents — while James Inhofe’s career is based on denying basic science when it conflicts with his ideological prejudices and the desires of his paymasters in the fossil-fuel industry.
Storms are caused by heat; a hotter world feeds more storms. Insurance companies are already observing a steady rise in storm-caused property damage, which is going to cost them real money, which is why, unlike Mr. Inhofe and his denialist colleagues in Congress, they’re taking the problem seriously. Like Senator Whitehouse.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes coal corporate irresponsibility fossil fuels heroes
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 28: The Madness Of King George
Well-done, indeed. The Boston Globe:
SOMERSET — Activists in a lobster boat flying an American flag blocked the delivery of 40,000 tons of central Appalachian coal to Brayton Point Power Station Wednesday, bobbing for hours in the path of a freighter nearly 690 feet long.
“The climate crisis is real, and it’s staring us in the face, and we’re not doing anything,” said Marla Marcum, the on-land spokeswoman for the activists, who said she was there to bail them out of jail if the need arose.
The activists were not arrested, a Coast Guard spokesman said.
The lobster boat Henry David T. looked almost quaint, and certainly out of place, against the backdrop of the hulking power plant.
The freighter it blocked, more than 20 times its size, sat at the end of a long pier; the anchored lobster boat turned slowly in the current.
“I choose to place my body between the exploding mountain tops of Appalachia and the burning fires of our consumption and greed as a witness to the new way of being in the world that we know is possible,” one of the boat’s captains, Jay O’Hara, 31, wrote on the website coalisstupid.org, where activists live-blogged the protest.
O’Hara, of Bourne, and his cocaptain — Ken Ward, 57, of Jamaica Plain — called for Brayton Point to be shut down immediately for the sake of “planetary survival.”
Ward and O’Hara arrived at Brayton Point around 9 a.m. and dropped anchor, activists said; the freighter, the Energy Enterprise, arrived at about 11:15.
Coast Guard Petty Officer Robert Simpson said the two men cooperated with officials, but when the Coast Guard told them to move their boat, they realized that their anchor was stuck.
The Boston Coal Party. Works for me. May 16:
Boston’s role in our country’s creation lends the action of local environmentalists even greater historical resonance.
By blocking the delivery of almost a million pounds of coal to Brayton Point, Jay O’Hara and Ken Ward have struck a blow against a malign force which has co-opted our government for its own interests. Fossil fuel corporations, arguably the most powerful economic actors on the planet, exert incalculable influence on American politics. That they have offices on American soil doesn’t change the fact that they’re essentially colonial powers, enriching themselves on our tax dollars. Instead of funding schools, infrastructure, and a functional public health system, American citizens’ hard-earned money subsidizes oil and coal, pays to clean up spills, leaks, and toxic waste, and funds expensive wars — a textbook example of taxation without representation in the service of an occupying power.
O’Hara and Ward make me proud to be a Bostonian.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: Arctic biodiversity heroes scientific method timescale
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 30: Sink or Swim
The Japan Times introduces us to a polar explorer and total mensch:
RESOLUTE, NUNAVUT – Spending six months of every year in the Arctic, adventurer Tetsuhide Yamazaki sees the impact of global warming firsthand through the region’s thinning sea ice, the expanse of which has roughly halved in the last three decades.
The ice is “very thin this year,” Yamazaki, 45, said after confirming a thickness of 118 cm with a drill during his recent exploration of an area at the North Pole. Sea ice in the area is usually almost 2 meters thick, according to Yamazaki, who senses the ice grows thinner every year.
Born in October 1967 in Hyogo Prefecture and raised in a coastal town in Fukui Prefecture, Yamazaki decided to become an explorer when he was in high school in Kyoto after reading a book by well-known adventurer Naomi Uemura, who climbed Mount McKinley solo in 1970. The explorer was lost on the mountain in February 1984.
After graduating, Yamazaki worked in Tokyo to save funds for his first trip at age 19 — rafting the Amazon. But it ended in failure after his boat capsized. The following year, Yamazaki successfully rafted some 5,000 km down the river in over a span of 44 days.
This February, he camped on an ice floe in the Arctic at a latitude of 74 degrees north. The temperature was minus 41 degrees, and the inside of his tent was covered with frost that formed from moisture released from his body. The dogs drawing his sled were around the tent.
There’s a hero for you. April 18:
While a scientist can observe its impact very clearly in the Arctic, global climate change is no longer something only specialists can detect, but a phenomenon which affects us all, regardless of where we live. The interconnected web of Earthly life is far more sensitive to environmental factors than most of us can imagine, and climatic disruption is making itself felt in ways that will only become more severe as the greenhouse effect intensifies.
When flowers open a fortnight early, the insects that fertilize them may still be in their larval stages. When plants fail to spread their seeds, animals that depend on them for nourishment may have to seek food elsewhere. When agriculture reels under the impact of extreme weather or devastating drought, food prices go up.
For years we have thought of climate change as something that belongs to future times and distant places. Dr. Tetsuhide Yamazaki’s observations confirm: the consequences of industrial civilization’s fossil-fuel consumption belong to us all. There is no time left to waste, and no place left to hide.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies denialists heroes media irresponsibility NASA scientific method
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 15: Hardly A Man Is Now Alive
Mind you, this is the same paper that recently shut down its Environment reporting entirely:
James E. Hansen, the climate scientist who issued the clearest warning of the 20th century about the dangers of global warming, will retire from NASA this week, giving himself more freedom to pursue political and legal efforts to limit greenhouse gases.
His departure, after a 46-year career at the space agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, will deprive federally sponsored climate research of its best-known public figure.
At the same time, retirement will allow Dr. Hansen to press his cause in court. He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions, for instance, as well as in fighting the development in Canada of a particularly dirty form of oil extracted from tar sands.
“As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government,” he said in an interview.
A hero. Resurrecting the Paul Revere meme for James Hansen. April 2:
Two hundred and thirty eight years ago, courageous patriots sounded a call; a midnight ride alerted the Minutemen to the arrival of the Redcoats — and the consequences are both an indelible part of our nation’s history and an irrefutable testament to the value of an early-warning system.
The modern equivalents are the world’s climate scientists, who have been trying to wake up a complacent citizenry for decades.
Dr. James Hansen’s resignation from NASA in order to devote himself to alerting America and the world to the climate crisis is a measure of the trouble we’re in. Dr. Hansen and his colleagues have received opprobrium and insult simply for doing their jobs responsibly. If Paul Revere had faced an analogous situation in April 1775, he’d have to persuade “every Middlesex village and farm” not only that the British existed, but that King George’s army posed a danger to their lives and liberty.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists heroes
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 2: A Good Guy
Pennsylvania Rep. Greg Vitali has some good ideas, which he outlines in the Delco Times:
House Bill 100 would amend the Pennsylvania Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard Act to require Pennsylvania electric distribution companies like PECO and PP&L to obtain 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2023. The requirement is currently 8 percent by 2021.
Increasing its Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard (AEPS) is the most effective way for Pennsylvania to expand its production of renewable energy. Many other states have already increased their renewable energy standards. New Jersey will require 17.88 percent of its energy to come from renewable sources by 2021.
H.B. 100 would accomplish the equivalent of taking more than 4 million cars off the road, according to the Penn-Future energy center.
The cost of Pennsylvania’s AEPS is relatively small. The PennFuture energy center estimated that the cost of implementing the AEPS in 2011 was only 6.6 cents per month for residential consumers. In contrast, the damage from Superstorm Sandy was estimated to be as high as $60 billion.
A second renewable energy bill (H.B. 200) would provide $25 million per year to the Pennsylvania Sunshine Solar program. This popular program has provided rebates to homeowners and small businesses that install solar systems. The program was initially funded by a $100 million bond issue in 2008 but it has run out of money. The new funding would come from the recently enacted Marcellus shale impact fee.
Orchids where they’re deserved. March 21:
Common-sense legislation like Rep. Greg Vitali’s alternative energy bills should be enacted throughout the United States. Unfortunately, far too many American politicians have been co-opted by the fossil fuel industry, which has invested heavily in lobbying and misinformation efforts aimed at discrediting both climate science and the viability of renewable energy sources. Since corporations don’t own the wind or sun and cannot expect to profit from renewable energy programs, their opposition is understandable — but unforgivable.
Climate change is not just a hypothesis, but a gravely dangerous reality, and while it’s decades too late for us to avert the catastrophic consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect, we can and must act rapidly to stop exacerbating the situation further by adding yet more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Lawmakers who are beholden to Big Oil and Big Coal are on the wrong side of history — and the wrong side of science.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists heroes idiots Republican obstructionism timescales
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 31: The Kids Are Alright
The Seattle Times notes WA Governor Inslee’s commitment to issues that genuinely transcend politics:
OLYMPIA — There was a telling moment just before Gov. Jay Inslee raised his right hand and took the oath of office.
He was introduced as a politician who sees climate change as “an existential threat that transcends politics.”
“More than any other president or governor before him, Jay has an electoral mandate on this issue,” Denis Hayes, organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970, told a packed audience in the rotunda two months ago.
If lawmakers did not grasp the significance of those remarks then, they do now.
Inslee talks about climate change all the time. He discussed it in his inaugural address, during most of his news conferences, when introducing a bill on the issue in the state House and Senate, even in announcing his choice for transportation secretary.
{snip}
Still, not everyone was expecting so much, so soon.
“I think there are greater, more pressing priorities at the moment,” said Senate Deputy Republican Leader Don Benton, R-Vancouver. “I think we need to look long term, and do little things that add up over time that will benefit and help the climate-change situation and the environment. But they are long-term strategies.”
Well, add Don Benton to our list of dingalings, I guess. March 19:
Of course State Senator Don Benton thinks there are more important things “at the moment” than climate change. Of course he’s ready to advocate “little things that add up over time” that may help us address what he charmingly calls the “climate-change situation.”
There will always be more pressing short-term issues than climate change, because even a steadily accelerating greenhouse effect is going to offer consequences on a time-scale larger than that of electoral politics. While there is no magic bullet that will fix the burgeoning climate crisis any more than there is a pill to cure lung cancer, this fact simply reinforces Governor Inslee’s sense of genuine responsibility.
That the climate “situation” is vastly larger than the problems usually preoccupying our politicians is no reason to dismiss it. There may be more important things at the moment — but climate change is not an issue of the moment, but of the millennium.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility corruption heroes
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 29: Things We Said Today
Sure wish we had more like this guy, as reported by the Rutland Herald (VT):
MONTPELIER — It was fitting that on a day devoted to talking about global warming, a makeshift parking lot at Montpelier High School was a mud pit by 1 p.m. in the middle of March.
Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., hosted a conference on climate change Saturday at Montpelier High School. Around 400 Vermonters heard from Sanders, state officials, students at the University of Vermont and climate author Bill McKibben about what may happen to the planet if something is not done to curb climate change.
“Global warming is not only real, it is terribly real,” Sanders said. “It is the planetary crisis of our time. If we don’t get our act together, this planet will only get worse.”
He added, “We have a moral responsibility, not only to ourselves, but to our kids and grandchildren and great grandchildren.”
Doing the right thing shouldn’t be so unusual, but it is. March 17:
Bernie Sanders’ readiness to propose legislation which offers a genuinely responsible approach to climate change unfortunately puts him in a minority position in American politics. It also demonstrates once again how important it is for our elected officials not to be bought and controlled by the corporate interests which currently exert a grossly disproportionate influence on our governance — because it is those same corporations which are standing in the way of meaningful action on the climate crisis.
Many politicians appear to believe that the political consequences of meaningful climate action would put them out of work. Perhaps the Republicans currently in thrall to their anti-science tea-party constituents are correct — but a steadily increasing majority of the American people recognize a crisis when they see one, and are eager for their government to start taking the problem with the seriousness it demands.
It is a profound indictment of our system’s current level of corruption that Bernie Sanders has become a “climate hero” simply by offering a policy proposal based on the sound intellectual and ethical principles which most other lawmakers have long ago sacrificed at the altar of their corporate paymasters.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Durban Conference heroes Todd Stern
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Year 2, Month 12, Day 12: Oh, To Be Twenty-One Again
I have a new hero, Ms. Abigail Borah. The Washington Post:
Todd D. Stern, the Obama administration’s special envoy for climate change, was put on the defensive by a narrative developing here that the United States opposed any further action to address global climate disruption until after 2020, when the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a primary United Nations climate agreement, and voluntary programs negotiated more recently will have run their course.
He firmly denied that the United States was dragging its feet and, somewhat ambiguously, endorsed a proposal from the European Union to quickly start negotiating a new international climate change treaty.
Mr. Stern’s statement to delegates from more than 190 nations at the annual climate conference was disrupted by a 21-year-old Middlebury College junior, Abigail Borah, who told the assembly that she would speak for the United States because Mr. Stern had forfeited the right to do so.
“I am speaking on behalf of the United States of America because my negotiators cannot,” said Ms. Borah, who is attending the conference as a representative of the International Youth Climate Movement. “The obstructionist Congress has shackled justice and delayed ambition for far too long. I am scared for my future. 2020 is too late to wait. We need an urgent path to a fair, ambitious and legally binding treaty.”
Scores of delegates and observers gave her a sustained ovation. Then the South African authorities threw her out of the conference. “That’s O.K.,” Ms. Borah, who is from Princeton, N.J., said later by telephone. “I think I got my point across.”
Let’s hope so. The “hindsight is always 2020” line came courtesy of Sven Eberlein. Sent December 8:
If Todd Stern’s assertions about an international agreement on greenhouse emissions are to be believed, our nation’s chief climate negotiator may have had his eyes opened a bit by the opposition he’s encountering at the Durban conference. By now, the scientific evidence cannot be ignored, and the picture isn’t a pretty one: while the epiphenomena of rapidly increasing climate change imperil us all, the United States has abdicated its responsibilities to the international community and abandoned all pretense of world leadership on what is arguably the most crucial issue of our time.
Let us hope Mr. Stern’s vision has been cleared by his encounter with far-sighted protesters like Ms. Abigail Borah. If we must wait another nine years for an agreement to restrict greenhouse emissions, it will be too late, and the old saw that “hindsight is always 2020” will have taken on a newer and far more tragic meaning.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Durban Conference heroes idiots Kyoto Republican obstructionism
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Year 2, Month 12, Day 11: What Barbara Said
I wish we could clone Barbara Boxer. The LA Times:
U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) stepped up Wednesday to deliver an appeal from Capitol Hill for action at the mostly lackluster U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which wraps up this week in Durban, South Africa. Her speech was delivered to an almost-empty Senate TV/radio gallery, which is indicative of the low priority given ongoing greenhouse gas treaty negotiations by the federal government and the media.
Audience shortfall be damned, Boxer soldiered on, registering her support for urgent action in Durban and beyond, and attacking climate deniers who have slowed progress toward reform. She and 15 other senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton looking for a “strong and ambitious outcome” in Durban.
“Although I am not there with you in person, it in no way lessens my commitment to the work that you are doing in Durban and the importance of your mission to address climate change,” Boxer said. A text of the speech was also provided to the media.
“This massive threat to the environment and human health that is posed by climate change requires us to put aside partisan differences, to find common ground and to demand immediate international action.”
Statesmanship. How weird is that? Sent December 7:
Senator Boxer’s impassioned address on the urgency of the climate crisis is an all-too-rare example of long-term thinking from a member of America’s political class. Most senators and representatives cannot imagine anything beyond the political exigencies of the next election cycle and the concomitant financial requirements of their political campaigns. This has brought us a government obsessed with trivia and symbolism but unable to focus on a genuine existential threat.
For the United States and the rest of the world’s biggest carbon-burners to postpone meaningful emissions reductions yet again, they’ll have to disregard mountains of scientific evidence linking human activity to the greenhouse effect, along with the increasingly accurate predictions and urgent warnings climate specialists have been making for decades. If we are to survive as a nation (indeed, as a species), we have to get our attention deficit under control — and address climate change realistically and vigorously. Now.
Warren Senders
environment: community community involvement heroes responsibility
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Year 2, Month 5, Day 3: Niiiiiice.
The Christian Science Monitor does an Earth Day report on a woman named Erin Barnes, and her group, which is named IOBY (“In Our Back Yards”). Good for her:
Dowser: What is unique about ioby’s mission as an environmental organization?
Erin Barnes, co-founder and executive director: It’s part of the values that we have as an organization to work locally and be invested in the community. Ioby, the name, comes from the opposite of “nimby” (Not In My Backyard).
We started the organization because we felt like the environmental movement had long been concentrated on places where people don’t live. We felt that the interaction between people or communities and the environment was meaningful.
Every project we support through our site has to meet our environmental criteria. They have to be doing something that benefits the community too.
It’s nice to see somebody doing the right thing for once.
Sent April 25:
Ms. Barnes’ group has the right name. The effects of global warming cannot be relegated to other places; we are all in this together. Since climate change manifests locally, regionally, nationally and globally, we need to tackle the problem in the same way. Personal efforts must combine with the work of neighborhood groups; statewide initiatives and a national movement for environmental responsibility need to go hand in hand. Furthermore, it’s not enough for our response to this imminent catastrophe to be polycentric; just as the greenhouse effect is going to continue to influence Earth’s climate for centuries to come, our thinking must be polytemporal, extending beyond the narrow short-term. It is time for human civilization to begin imagining the distant future — and to recognize that “business as usual” is going to render that future a dystopian hell in short order.
Warren Senders